The Funeral of Mass Murderer Bill Cook

After Bill Cook, who killed the Mosser family in Joplin, was sentenced to death in California and was scheduled to die in the gas chamber, a funeral director from Comanche, Oklahoma, Glen Boydston, contacted the Cook family and offered to bring the body back for them if they would agree to let him hold a small service in Comanche before bringing Bill on to Joplin for burial. Boydston said a wealthy Comanche resident had offered to foot the bill as a tribute to his own wayward son, now deceased. Bill's father, William Cook, signed papers agreeing to the arrangement because the family didn't have the money to pay to have the body transported. When Badman Bill, as he was sometimes called, was executed on December 12, 1952, at San Quentin, Boydston was there waiting to take charge of the body.
But what happened after the undertaker got the body back to Comanche wasn't quite what the Cook family had bargained for.
When Boydston pulled up outside his funeral home early Sunday morning, December 14, a large crowd was waiting to greet him. The body was then displayed in an open casket inside the funeral home with the tattooed words "Hard Luck" still plainly visible across Cook's knuckles. Curiosity seekers streamed by all day Sunday, eager to get a glimpse of the notorious killer. "Mothers carried babies in their arms and fathers held their sons by the hand," said an Oklahoma newspaper, "as they stopped to look at the body of the killer from the Joplin slag pits."
One little boy told a reporter that he'd read about Cook in the newspaper and that he'd talked his mama into bringing him to the funeral home to get a look at him. A man said he came because he just wanted to see what "a real bad man" looked like. Women visitors, though, outnumbered men, and several them remarked on Cook's physical features. One woman said, "What a fine looking boy. He has beautiful hair. He doesn't look like a man who would do such a thing." The crowds on Sunday were still coming in droves when Boydston's wife finally locked the doors at 9 p.m.
The next day, Monday the 15th, the curious crowds kept coming and even increased. From all sections of Oklahoma they came and even some from surrounding states like Texas and Colorado. Seven busloads of kids from a school in Texas stopped by, after some school official apparently decided that viewing the corpse of a heinous and notorious killer would make an edifying activity for a field trip. By the end of the day on Monday, an estimated 10,000 people had paraded through the funeral home to view the body.
By Tuesday, so many people had come to take a gander at Cook's body that the funeral directors stopped trying to count them. "The number just got away from us," said one representative of the funeral home. On Tuesday evening, though, it was estimated that 15,000 people had paid a visit since Sunday morning.
Meanwhile, in Joplin the Cook family heard a radio report Tuesday evening about the carnival atmosphere in Comanche and the huge number of people who'd been allowed to view Bill's body. They called the Joplin Globe in anger requesting that word be disseminated demanding that the public display of Bill's body and plans for a public funeral in Comanche the next day be immediately halted. The family was particularly upset by reports that a collection box had been put out near the coffin for donations, because they said they did not want to try make money from Bill's death and they didn't want anybody else to do so either. They said Boydston had violated the agreement he had made with them to hold only a small, private funeral in Comanche and not to seek publicity. The Cook family left for Comanche later Tuesday night with plans to drive all night and personally "put a stop to" the funeral service slated for the next day.
When an Oklahoma newspaper reporter called at the Boydston funeral home in Comanche Tuesday night and informed the attendant of the Cook family's anger, the attendant said Boydston himself was home resting because he was so exhausted from the past few days' activities but he added that only $31 had been collected in the donation box and that it had been used to buy flowers.
Representatives of the Cook family arrived in Comanche early Wednesday morning and threatened a lawsuit if the funeral scheduled later that day was not called off. Boydston, saying he never meant any harm, immediately canceled the service, and the body was taken to Derfelt Funeral Home in Galena, Kansas, later on the 17th. After dark that same evening, the body was taken by back roads to Peace Church Cemetery at the northwest edge of Joplin for burial, arriving about 8:40 p.m. Although one newspaper headline called it an "eerie night service," the burial was, by most accounts, a small, private, brief, and simple service attended only by family, close friends, a minister, an undertaker, and one Joplin newspaper reporter, about fifteen people in total. The Rev. Dow Booe of Galena, minister of Joplin's First Gospel Workers' Church, delivered a short sermon before Cook was lowered into an unmarked grave next to where his mother had been buried almost twenty years earlier, the whole service lasting about ten minutes.